Results from the 2025 Nationals – Chardonnay

Announcing the Results from the 2025 National Wine Awards of Canada

The 2025 Nationals took place in Penticton from June 21st to 25th. Today, we are pleased to announce the winners in the Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Gamay. Category results will be rolling out throughout the rest of July, concluding with the Winery of the Year announcement on August 1st. We hope that you will stay tuned to follow the results!

Chardonnay

Category Overview by Judge DJ Kearney

Go straight to the winners.

Few styles of Canadian wine are more exciting and diverse than chardonnay. Burgundy’s noble white queen has bedded down across the country and established herself dramatically. Well suited to Canada’s abbreviated growing seasons, this early budder and easy ripener is responsive to nuances of climate, topography and geology, and invites winemaking techniques (the reductive approach in particular) like no other grape. The amplitude of choice from lean, savoury, minerally to plush, decadently fruited and opulent is quite staggering for a region that has only 3,122 acres of chardonnay (1,875 acres representing 18% of all Ontario wine; 1,247 acres accounting for 9.83% of wine in BC) plus a smattering in Nova Scotia and Quebec.

Having judged the National Wine Awards every year for more than two decades, I’ve had the privilege of seeing chardonnay styles morph and mature through phases of an overabundance of oak, sweet and boozy, overripe, vegetal, or trying to mimic Burgundy or California. Canadian chardonnay is coming of age now, where older vineyards, thoughtful farming and the desire to express site is evident not only in our top winners, but throughout the category. That a few fabulous vintages (2022 in both BC and Ontario, for example) were on display certainly elevated the excitement level amongst all judges as we savoured the many, many flights of chardonnay.

Parsing the results was a fascinating exercise. Of the 180 chardonnays entered in the 2025 awards (105 of which received a medal), the platinum honours went to Okanagan Valley wines from the 2022 vintage – four entirely complete, impeccably balanced, confident wines, to be enjoyed by all who love wine, as well as those who scrutinize it for a living.

The platinum winners provided a veritable roll call of Okanagan chardonnay excellence. Quails’ Gate Rosemary’s Block has been amongst the cream for years with exacting precision and structure; Mission Hill’s flagship Perpetua is the picture of elegance, restrained power and mouthwatering succulence; Meyer’s perennially brilliant McLean Creek Vineyard expresses fulsome fruit with equally profound mineral heft; and 1 Mill Road dazzles with the flavour depth of old vines, thrilling tension, mineral salinity and unforgettable savoury length. Wow and wow again.

The gold category saw a notable shift to Ontario, where chardonnays are so distinct and chiselled. There were 19 gold medals handed out across the Niagara region, and one in Prince Edward County. Structurally unique with a wonderful balance of nervosity, lean fruit, and vivid acidity, Ontario makes exceptional agers or dinner table wines. BC captured 11 gold winners, mostly from the Okanagan and notably two from wonderful Unsworth showing how suitable Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley is for chardonnay.

And a final word: any of our Silver (33) or Bronze (42) chardonnays are well worthy of your tastebuds and time – this was a bulging category defined by quality, competence and utter deliciousness – and one of the best flights of wine I have ever witnessed from this great land of ours.

And the winners are…